I don’t care if @ladygaga retweets this (but it would be nice)

This isn’t a shot at Ms. Gaga, but too often people are concerned with a retweet from an influencer to validate their social media campaigns. Now there are a variety of reasons why a retweet by an individual with a large following only goes so far…

You can buy twitter followers very easily.

You probably have a fake or inactive account following you now.

CNN did a nice piece on fake twitter followers impacting the presidential campaigns. Using a service called Status People, CNN determined that around 28% of Mitt Romney’s twitter followers are fake/inactive accounts. If you happen to use total twitter followers as the determining factor for a campaign you will run a risk of falling prey to these vanity metrics. Mitt Romney’s Digital Director, Zac Moffatt, expands on this fact in the article;

“That’s the nature of the Web. But we don’t define success by that; our emphasis is not on vanity metrics such as overall number of followers. Actionable metrics such as re-tweets and mentions are all that matter.”

Moffatt brings up some very good points – it’s great if my campaign was seen by a million people but I should only care IF individuals took actions based on that information. These actions can be as easy as sharing (retweeting) this information, engaging in the conversation to further develop the story or sign up/buy/complete the desired action I originally launched my campaign to promote. I usually visualize this as a pyramid ranking these actions.

The bottom of my pyramid is composed of all of the “eyeballs” that could of seen my campaign. Each additional layer represents a more desirable action until the pyramid culminates in the original purpose of the campaign. Now this is based on my personal experience working with different campaigns – would you change or include other factors when you report on your campaigns? Feel free to post your opinions below!